Unity Manual

Native Plugins

Unity has extensive support for native Plugins, which are libraries of native code written in C, C++, Objective-C, etc. Plugins allow your game code (written in Javascript or C#) to call functions from these libraries. This feature allows Unity to integrate with middleware libraries or existing C/C++ game code.

In order to use a native plugin you firstly need to write functions in a C-based language to access whatever features you need and compile them into a library. In Unity, you will also need to create a C# script which calls functions in the native library.

The native plugin should provide a simple C interface which the C# script then exposes to other user scripts. It is also possible for Unity to call functions exported by the native plugin when certain low-level rendering events happen (for example, when a graphics device is created), see the Native Plugin Interface page for details.

Example

A very simple native library with a single function might have source code that looks like this:

float FooPluginFunction () { return 5.0F; }

To access this code from within Unity, you could use code like the following: